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Submission + - Adobe Flash Player installer deletes itself (adobe.com)

Submitted by
Jezisheck
Jezisheck writes: "I've recently discovered weird behavior of the Flash Player installer from Adobe's site (for Windows). Not only that every time you run it, it sets the update setting to the option that allows Adobe to install updates without asking you, even if you continuously select otherwise, but it also deletes the binary from which it was run! This happens immediately after it's run. So if installation fails for some reason (i.e. the player is in use at the moment) then you have to go and download it again or you have to replicate the installer before running it. As I understand that most users don't need the installer binary when installation is complete, either way, I want to be the master of my OS and I want to delete files on it when I want and the way I want! And also: I believe that even the most retarded PC user knows how to delete a file by himself. Is Adobe looking at users as a bunch of incompetent idiots which they must take care of?"
Google

Submission + - Google pays $250 million for social ad start-up Wildfire (reuters.com)

Submitted by bigvibes
bigvibes writes: Google Inc said on Tuesday it acquired marketing start-up Wildfire to help the world's largest Internet search company expand further into social media.

Google paid about $250 million for the business, according to a person familiar with the deal. The source is not authorized to speak publicly about the transaction and requested anonymity.

Comment The real question is... (Score 2) 345

by casab1anca (#40838537) Attached to: Should Developers Support Windows Phone 8?
not should, but will developers support WP8.

The platform itself is very much comparable to iPhone or Android, and even had some nifty features that stood out from the competition when it first came out: Live Tiles and the People hub to name two. I don't know why developers never took to the platform -- there isn't a reason they shouldn't support it, and whether WP8 will change their minds remains to be seen.
Patents

Submission + - RIM Facing $147.2 Million Patent verdict (reuters.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Reuters reports that beleaguered wireless device maker Research In Motion is on the losing end of a patent suit that will cost them $147.2 million. The jury arrived at that number by assigning an $8 royalty for every BlackBerry connected to RIM's enterprise server software. Unsurprisingly, RIM intends to appeal the decision. 'Mformation sued RIM in 2008, bringing claims on a patent for a process that remotely manages a wireless device over a wireless network, a court filing says. According to its web site, Mformation helps corporations manage their smart phone inventory. The company also says it helps telecoms operators, such as AT&T and Sprint, with remote fixes and upgrades for users' gadgets. RIM argued that Mformation's patent claims are invalid because the processes were already being used when Mformation filed its patent application.'

Submission + - Chicken vaccines combine to produce deadly virus (wired.com)

Submitted by
stoilis
stoilis writes: "From the Wired article: "Vaccines aren’t supposed to cause disease. But that appears to be what’s happening on Australian farms. Scientists have found that two virus strains used to vaccinate chickens there may have recombined to form a virus that is sickening and killing the animals."
"This shows that recombination of such strains can happen and people need to think about it," says Glenn Browning, a veterinary microbiologist at the University of Melbourne, Parkville, in Australia and one of the co-authors on the paper."
Google

Submission + - What's it really like to work at Google? (pcpro.co.uk)

Submitted by
Barence
Barence writes: "Google has a reputation for being a fun place to work, full of toys and intelligent people working on world-changing projects. But what's life really like inside the search giant? PC Pro has interviewed Google employees, past and present, to get a glimpse into live inside the Google campuses. The feature paints a picture of 20-something workaholics who are on 24-hour call with their company-provided Android smartphones, and exposes the divisions created by the company's controversial badge system."
Science

Submission + - Marijuana farms poisoning carnivorous beasts in CA (mongabay.com) 1

Submitted by rhettb
rhettb writes: Anticoagulant rodenticides used by illegal marijuana growers are poisoning weasel-like fishers in California, finds a new study published in the journal PLoS ONE. Researchers conducted necropsies on 58 fishers and found 79% were exposed to one or more anticoagulant rodenticides. The exposure points were likely encountered where the anticoagulant rodenticides are used illicitly as part of illegal marijuana cultivation in remote areas that overlap with fisher habitat.

Submission + - Take a $33k paycut for better developer experience? 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: After college I was hired as a Junior .NET Developer (C#) for company X. Five years later I am still at company X, now called a Senior Level and given $120k a year, with a $10k bonus and guaranteed $10k raise come January. The problem begins in that company X doesn't sell software, it sells product — it's an e-commerce company that does not outsource and has it's own small development team. It's not a coding house, and large projects are worked on through ticket systems as if it was simple tech support. Bad habits and poor practices have molded me into a 'right now' developer and not a 'right way' developer, being reactive and solving problems as they come.

After applying for a Senior level position at company Y — which is a coding house that is extremely organized and object/design-oriented — the interview did not go as well as hoped, even with my excellent troubleshooting and problem-solving skills. I got the impression this was due to a lacking in my OOP skill set, which I attribute to not being given proper direction by my superiors, the time to spend iterating design, and my ignorance in the way I was growing as a developer was not how I should. Instead of a potential matching salary, they said they would have to bring me in at $90k, possibly $100k if I aced an interview lab.

Company Y would be able to reign in my cowboy coding skills and help me get on the path of the Jedi.

The question posed to Slashdot readers: Is the gigantic pay cut worth it? Should I remain at X — which is becoming an unbearable work environment — for the pay and spend the rest of my waking hours unlearning what I'd still have to use daily and study/practice every facet of C# and OO principles?
Java

Submission + - JQuery 2.0 will Drop Support for IE 6, 7, 8 (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by
benfrog
benfrog writes: "The developers of JQuery recently announced in a blog entry that JQuery 2.0 will drop support for legacy versions of Internet Explorer. The release will come in parallel with version 1.9, however, which will include support for older versions of IE. The versions will offer full API compatibility, but 2.0 will 'benefit from a faster implementation that doesn’t have to rely on legacy compatibility hacks.'""
Advertising

Submission + - The ugly, profitable details about Xbox Live advertising (penny-arcade.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In an editorial at Penny Arcade, Ben Kuchera writes about how Microsoft's subscription-based Xbox Live platform has become an advertising cash cow — to the detriment of users who already pay for the service. Quoting: 'People who don’t play video games would be forgiven if they turned on an Xbox 360 and didn’t realize it was a device used to primarily play games. The first screen you see on the Xbox 360 Dashboard is often a mixture of ads for all sorts of goods and services, and many times games are in the minority of ad slots. The latest redesign increased the ad space that can be sold to advertisers, and that in turn increased this problem. Let’s be clear, it is a problem. Game discovery is terrible in the current design of Xbox Live, and the usability of a system that used to be about games is suffering in order for Microsoft to make money on ads. Sadly, this issue isn’t going away: Ad sales simply bring in too much money to ignore, and revenue is growing. ... I contacted Microsoft and asked how much advertising revenue impacted the profitability of the Xbox 360. “We don’t share this information publicly but we can tell you that, since 2010, the advertising business has grown 142%,” I was told.'
Security

All Your Coffee Are Belong To Us 354

Posted by kdawson from the pouring-over-it dept.
Wolf nipple chips writes "Craig Wright discovered that the Jura F90 Coffee maker, with its honest-to-God Jura Internet Connection Kit, can be taken over by a remote attacker, who can cause the coffee to be weaker or stronger; change the amount of water per cup; or cause the machine to require service (call this one a DDoC). 'Best yet, the software allows a remote attacker to gain access to the Windows XP system it is running on at the level of the user.' An Internet-enabled, remote-controlled coffee-machine and XP backdoor — what more could a hacker ask for?"
Security

Submission + - Mac OS X root escalation through AppleScript

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Half the Mac OS X boxes in the world (confirmed on Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger and 10.5 Leopard) can be rooted through AppleScript: osascript -e 'tell app "ARDAgent" to do shell script "whoami"'; Works for normal users and admins, provided the normal user wasn't switched to via fast user switching. Secure? I think not.
The Almighty Buck

The Impact of Low Salaries At Apple 782

Posted by kdawson from the baby-needs-a-new-pair-of-shoes dept.
orenh writes "Recent data indicate that Apple engineers have significantly lower salaries than their Silicon Valley peers: $89,000 at Apple, versus $105,000 at Yahoo and $112,000 at Google. Paying lower salaries had a major impact on Apple's bottom line when it was struggling in the market up until 2004. But now that Apple is highly profitable, these lower salaries are no longer a factor in Apple's success. Will Apple have to raise salaries to match the market rate, or face defections?"
Transportation

SwiftFuel Alternative To Alternative Fuels 725

Posted by samzenpus from the how-about-pedals dept.
TheDawgLives writes "PBS has an article by Bob Cringely about the best route to end our dependence on oil and reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. Instead of replacing all our expensive cars with even more expensive hybrids or electric cars, his suggestion is to use a cheap drop-in replacement for gasoline called Swift Fuel. It is derived from Ethanol, but doesn't require any modification to older cars to prevent corrosion. It can be mixed with gasoline in any amount and can even be distributed using the same network as gasoline, including being pumped in the same pipes and shipped in the same trucks. It is truly a drop-in replacement for gas, and it is real. It is being tested by the FAA for certification in propeller aircraft. It also happens to be about $2 a gallon cheaper than gasoline."

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